This podcast is to celebrate the coming season, and is sort of the corollary to last week's preseason analysis post, Wolves' Ball Addition Signals Renewed Focus On Transition, Pick'n'roll And Movement.

We were inspired to invite Abhinav Bethi by a very good initial Substack post analyzing the Ball addition in the Wolves sub-Reddit. Though he's in India, he was quick to respond to our entreaties and sharp in his basketball analysis by and large. While we hope to have a variety of guests discussing the Wolves this season, we're almost assured to have Abhinav back.

During the podcast we discuss LaMelo Ball's addition, his impact on the offense, and how this reduced responsibility might help Anthony Edwards. We discuss the makeup of the frontcourt and especially the "4" in the absence of Randle & Reid, and how Williams, Lyles and Kuminga bring length, quickness and athleticism that was missing from the position, and for all three, this is a bit of second bite of the apple after disappointing starts to their careers.

We also discuss how these moves might reflect the Wolves post-season struggles and specifically what kind of offensive sets this represents and how this increased efficiency will help, alongside what their main issues were in the playoffs last year defensively and how these new additions help to address that. Finally we talk about the issue of spacing, how the added ballhandling will allow the Wolves to take better advantage of it, and how the challenge will be to find a "4" that can consistently hit their threes.

We finish by discussing our takes on potential finals teams.

We discus how the early eighties Los Angeles scene really designed the template for what became underground music culture and the careers and outside-the-lines existence is due to he and his peers. We talk about how Dream Syndicate ripped off the Stooges and other acts besides the Velvets. How there is no real due for artists, as much as you might feel they deserved more accolades. We discuss how much fun he has with the Baseball Project and Gutterball and his desert isle discs and what a fascinating mysterious weirdo Dylan was and how he feared writing his memoir but now that he has he's excitedly working on the second book. And we spoke about how you stay passionate and don't sell out by not resting on your laurels and always challenging yourself with new potentialities or re-exploring old ones and how much he loves playing solo.

American Cultural; Critic living in England, Will Kaufman jumped the pond from New Jersey in the eighties for post-grad and liked it so much, he didn’t come back. He made fine use of that early education though, when he became a professor on American Lit and an expert on Woody Guthrie.

He’s just released his second volume in a series on American songs of protest and struggle, this running from the post-war to the current day. Kaufman’s a sharp, expansive thinker (as well as a guitarist) and the conversation wanders freely around subjects of music, literature and politics.

We discuss how Will became an expert on Woody Guthrie, Woody's aesthetic, the difference between struggle vs. protest songs, and the Mermaid Avenue/Man in the Sand sessions with Wilco, notably, Jeff Tweedy, and Billy Bragg, We talk a bit about Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Pete Seegar, as well as the emergence of bee-bop, Ella Fitzgerald and Sara Vaughn.

We also discuss hip-hop, punk and the Paul Simon/Martin Carthy row over “Scarborough Fair,” and how that illustrates many of the contradictions of the cultural appropriations argument, which at its core is just about acknowledgment in the first place.

We discuss the challenges of describing music no one has ever heard and how one collapses 80 years of modern music history into a single volume. We dig into the challenge of satire and its role as a vehicle of speech and how it dovetails with protest, the question of whether it’s legal to sing your testimony to the court, how protest and satire function to diminish the perceived power of the oppressors and the lessons this might hold for this moment in time.